MMOs and game design

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Sometimes a picture speaks a thousand words … and other times it needs a little explanation.

Last week, we were mulling around in guild groups after having (somehow!) won a Tol Barad battle, and the suggestion was made that we go chill out in an older raid instance. One of my guildies had a key for Algalon’s chamber in Ulduar so off we went to beat up the titans messenger and get a spiffy new title for people.

By the way, anyone who considers themselves to be a ‘Wrath Baby’ can properly feel old now – we had people in the raid who didn’t know where Ulduar was or how to get there.

Now the Algalon encounter has a lot of lore (read: cut scene) attached to it, and after you beat him in combat, you get to go back to Dalaran and report back to Rhonin, the leader of the Dalaran mages. He then leaves his violet citadel and takes you on a walk through the streets of Dalaran to activate a magical beacon.

In this screenshot, you can see that when our bunch of raggamuffin hordies showed up with the NPC, a couple of alliance chicks were enjoying a quiet chat (ERP? you be the judge) on the base of the beacon. What they thought when the NPC marched straight up to them and started talking about how deviate the planet was I do not know …

It’s always interesting at the start of an expansion to watch the queue sizes on popular servers like Argent Dawn (well over an hour at peak time last night) – reminds me of how many people actually play this thing, when they’re all encouraged to log in at the same time. (And how much scope there is for improving the server architecture too ….)

So I haven’t had a lot of time in game. One thing I have noticed though is that random green drops in Vash’jir look to be better quality than similar green quest rewards. (For example, I picked up a level 79 dagger with +963 spellpower on it – that’s a similar item level (283) to the caster drops from heroic 25 man Lich King. Level 79.)

If this is intended and not just an item glitch, it’s quite a turn up for the books. In other expansions, green drops were mostly disenchanting fodder since there were bound to be better quest rewards just around the corner. Quests gave better rewards and it was partly an incentive to do them.

But it always felt strange to just sell item drops as if they were trash. I think I like the idea that it should be exciting when any type of item drops, even if it’s just for an alt or for resale. Disenchanting shouldn’t really be the automatic response.

Cataclysm Screenshot

This is a picture from the beginning of the Lich King fight. Arthas pauses as he’s running up towards the tank to cast infest. This drives me nuts because he stops for just long enough for ranged to get threat on him if we aren’t careful with the misdirects.